FAQs
- The T-FINDER platform is designed to functionally identify and map cognate epitopes to human T cell receptors (TCRs) with high speed and accuracy. It utilizes physiological antigen processing and T-cell activation processes.
- Traditional methods often rely on engineered variants of TCRs and peptide:HLA complexes, prior knowledge of epitopes, or predictive tools based on flawed, biased, or incomplete data sets. T-FINDER can identify TCR:target interactions de novo and is internally validating, meaning that while it is compatible with other approaches, it is not dependent on them. This overcomes the limitations of fully cataloging TCR interactions.
- High physiological relevance
- Agnostic and unbiased HLA coverage of both class I and class II alleles
- Ability to process long open reading frames (up to 400 amino acids) for comprehensive proteome coverage via epitope multiplexing
- Best-in-class signal-to-noise ratio for a TCR signaling reporter
- TCR, CAR, or similar T cell-activating receptors of interest are inserted into the T cell reporter line, which signals activation via fluorescence and secretes a label to tag antigen-presenting cells (APCs).
- Primary APCs (autologous or from a haplotyped biobank, or alternatives such as cancer cell lines or engineered APCs) process and present antigens from a library of putative targets, covering a broad range of epitopes and HLA alleles.
- Flexible throughput of combinatorial approach can functionally interrogate up to 20k potential TCR:ligand interactions per month, allowing for TCR-side and/or ligand-side library scaling.
- Researchers in oncology, autoimmunity, infectious diseases, and drug discovery
- Biopharma companies developing TCR/CAR-T cell therapies, tumor vaccines, and antigen-specific immunomodulation
- Academic immunologists investigating TCR functionality and adaptive immune responses in any field
- Current methods often require prior knowledge of epitopes or presenting alleles, limiting discovery scope and accuracy.
- High-throughput screening can be noisy and inefficient.
- Projects requiring TCR discovery, epitope mapping, or functional validation
- Research into tumor vaccines, autoantigen discovery, and infectious disease etiology and therapies
- Safety assessments and immunogenicity profiling
- TCR discovery and characterization
- Validation of TCR:epitope interactions
- Functional epitope mapping
- CAR-T evaluation
- Safety profiling of TCR-based therapies
- De novo TCR ligand identification
- High speed and precision in mapping TCR:ligand interactions
- Broad epitope and HLA coverage for comprehensive profiling
- Cost-efficient functional screening with reduced noise
- It leverages physiological antigen processing and presentation, overcoming limitations of engineered or peptide-loading approaches.
- It supports high-throughput yet precise screening with advanced sequencing and combinatorial methods.
- Physiological relevance, functional validation, agnostic HLA allele coverage, class II HLA-presented epitope identification, scalability, and precision in identifying TCR:ligand interactions
- Two publications in Science Advances describe the platform’s efficacy in functional TCR and ligand discovery.
- A fee-for-service model where customers define their research objectives, and BioMed X delivers tailored TCR:ligand mapping results
- Up-front payment in which customers gain full ownership of the results without royalty obligations
- Supported discovery research sponsorship with right-to-first-refusal of the results upon project completion
- Asset development program in which a disease modality is indicated by the customer and BioMed X delivers a series of TCR sequences with identified targets for cellular therapies
- No customer-side operation beyond the scientific vision is required; the platform operates as a service, with BioMed X handling the technical aspects.
- Publications and ongoing collaborations support further adoption of the platform, with demonstrated successes in tumor neoepitope identification and personalized therapy development.
